Last Saturday, during our weekly walk and talk, Rita asked, “How do you do your morning writing? I feel like I throw out bits and pieces of writing everywhere – in my journal, on my phone, in Docs, sometimes on scraps of paper – but I don’t really have a system.”
Dizzy from jetlag, I explained to her the simple practice I created for myself in the fall of 2008, when I added spoken storytelling to my daily writing as a way to look at myself and the world more clearly and deeply – and without judgments.
What I have come to call Story Asana™ combines breathing, writing, and spoken storytelling into a daily meditative practice.
Here’s how it works:
- Create a safe and separate space: If you are starting daily writing, or re-booting your writing practice to make it more thoughtful and meaningful, I recommend starting with a new journal and a pen you love to feel in your hand and return to every day. Put the day, date, and place at the top of the page to mark this new beginning.
- Take a minute or so to just breathe: Breathe in slowly, paying attention to one breath at a time. As you exhale, gently remove any obstacles to writing. Let them flow out the bottom of your feet and back into the earth where they come from. When you are ready …
- Begin by writing whatever comes to mind, and then – here’s what’s different about Story Asana – again and again, bring yourself back to story. Stories happen once. They happen in the world with other people; they aren’t thoughts, interpretation, criticism, or analysis. When you get distracted, return to story. Bring yourself back into the moment, the action of what’s happening around you.
- The word “because” is one way you know you’ve left storytelling and entered the world of criticism. Just stop – mid-sentence – note a detail that is right there in front of you (the color of your cat or the texture of the tablecloth, or the feeling of the floor under your feet), write it down, and then return to what happened in the world with other people.
- I often find I need to slow down and turn down my thoughts – especially the things I tell myself again and again – to return to story in this way. When I feel particularly stuck, I stand up and literally walk and talk my stories into the world. This practice of walking and talking to generate writing helps me get past where I am stuck.
Rita asked, “What do you do when you are distracted by the freight train of ideas, and feel like you need to stop writing?”
I write freely on the right hand side of my journal, and when distractions emerge – like big ideas to work through another time or tasks that feel urgent – I write them down on the left side of the page, very briefly, so they are captured and I can get back to writing! I learned this trick from the 17th- and 18th-century women poets I wrote about in English Women’s Poetry: they had very busy lives, as healers, artists, and maids in waiting, and when they had to process their brain’s tendency to distraction they just wrote the thing down and then kept writing!
There’s a lot more I can say about Story Asana, but the most important thing is to keep it super simple and just write for 20 minutes in the same journal every day. I’ve tried voice messages, Otter, and notes on my phone, and sometimes – especially when I have ideas in the middle of the day – talking or typing them out also works.
How did I get to Story Asana? I started daily writing when I was fourteen, and my father gave me my first journal. For several months In 2008, I used morning pages the way Julia Cameron describes them in The Artist’s Way. Eventually, I wanted to use daily writing to watch myself thinking and, over time, to shift my default ways of thinking. “Metacognition” is the word for thinking about thinking, and Marisa Peer was the first online teacher I heard saying that we can intentionally shift our thoughts about ourselves and how we show up in the world for other people. I was also influenced by my work with Narativ, and later by Vishen Lakhiani’s 6 Phase Meditation – particularly the practice of giving your intentions back to the Universe at the end of the meditation each day.
Last year, I combined Story Asana with the Jewish traditions of return and repentance associated with the month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Repentance, which is considered the holiest day in the Jewish Year). If you are interested in those mediations, you can find last year’s newsletters here and here.
A year later, Israel is still at war, having killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – many of them children – in both Gaza and the Israeli occupied West Bank of the Jordan River – Israel fiercely controls what news their citizens receive and has been openly assassinating the journalists who are telling stories of what’s happening on the ground in these war zones. The United States enables all of this, and it is profoundly underreported in the media here.
This year, daily writing feels even more sacred to me. I urge you to write daily to understand what is real to you, to bear witness to things that may be unthinkably hard to talk about but we need to express, and to tell your stories out loud in community. This is the greatest gift we can give one another in these unprecedented times.